How Much Does a Missed Call Cost a Plumber? A Worked Example

Most plumbers know missed calls cost them something. Very few have ever put a number on it. So I thought I'd do it the old-fashioned way, with one week, a notepad and some rough sums.

I'm Jad, founder of Slotby. I've already written about how many calls plumbers miss and how to count your own. This one's different. It follows a single plumber through a single week and adds up what slipped away.

One thing first. The plumber is made up and so are the prices. They're examples to show the working, not statistics. Swap in your own figures as you go and the answer will mean a lot more.

Meet Tom, Our Made-Up Plumber

Tom works on his own out of one van somewhere in England. He does repairs, boiler servicing and breakdowns, and the odd bathroom. He's good, he's busy, and his phone lives in his back pocket while he works.

For this example, say his jobs roughly look like this:

• A small repair like a dripping tap, a leak under a sink or a sticking valve comes to about £140.
• A boiler breakdown visit with a part comes to about £220.
• A weekend emergency costs the customer about £200 for the first hour.
• A bathroom refit is somewhere around £5,000.

Again, these are illustrative. Your rates might be higher or lower. The method is what matters.

Tom's Week, Call by Call

Here's every call Tom missed from a number he didn't know.

Seven missed calls. One turned out fine. One was junk. Four turned into work for somebody else, worth about £720 between them. And there's a bathroom sitting in the middle with a question mark on it.

That Thursday call is the one I keep coming back to. She wasn't fussy. She tried Tom, got nothing, and her neighbour had a number on the fridge. The whole thing took her about three minutes. Tom never knew it happened.

Turnover Isn't Profit, So Let's Be Fair

£720 sounds bad, but it's not what Tom actually lost. Some of that money would have gone on parts, fuel and his time. Say about two thirds of a small job is what he keeps once parts and diesel are paid for. That makes the real hit closer to £480 for the week.

And this was a busy week. Plenty of weeks will be quieter, with fewer calls and more of them ringing back. So let's halve it to be safe. Call it £240 of lost profit in a normal week.

Now stretch it out. Take off holidays and quiet spells and say Tom works 46 weeks a year.

• £240 a week comes to just over £900 a month.
• Over 46 weeks it's about £11,000 a year.

That's from the halved version, before the bathroom, and before any repeat work from those four customers. Halve it again if you think I'm being generous. You've still got five grand or so a year walking off to other vans.

The Bathroom With the Question Mark

I left it out of the sums on purpose, because you can't know if Tom would have won it. But think about the odds. If he'd been one of the first two people to quote, maybe he'd have had a one in three chance. Arriving third, a day late, it's lower.

Say the drop in his odds is worth a few percent of a £5,000 job. That's still a couple of hundred quid of expected value gone, from one voicemail sitting unheard for a day. Bigger jobs are where slow callbacks hurt most, because people ring around and the early quotes set the pace.

Sunday Morning Has a Price Too

Here's the bit that doesn't show up in a spreadsheet. Look at the Sunday call again. Tom had two choices, and both cost him something.

He could pick up at the football, drive over, and earn £200 at weekend rates. That's good money. But he gives up the morning with his son, and that's worth something too. Only Tom knows how much.

Or he lets it ring and the job goes. Which is what happened.

What he didn't have was a third option. Something that takes the caller's details, tells them the plumber's been told, and offers the first slot on Monday morning at his normal rate. Not every Sunday caller will wait. Some will, especially if it's a boiler that's playing up rather than one that's flooding the kitchen. Even catching one in three of those as a Monday job is money he'd otherwise never see, and he still gets his Sunday.

The daytime has its own hidden cost. Each time Tom stops a job to answer, he's peeling off a glove, wiping his hands, finding a pen, and apologising to the customer whose kitchen he's standing in. Five of those a day at a few minutes each is a good chunk of an hour. So answering everything yourself has a cost of its own.

Run the Sums for Your Own Week

You don't need a spreadsheet. On the back of a receipt, write down:

1. How many unknown callers you didn't reach in time last week.
2. Roughly how many of those you think went elsewhere.
3. Your average job value.
4. What you keep from a job after parts and fuel, as a fraction.

Multiply the last three together and you've got your weekly number. Times it by the weeks you work and you've got your year. If it comes out at a few hundred quid, fine, you're doing well and probably don't need to change much. If it's a few thousand, that's worth sorting before you spend another penny on leads or ads.

What I Think

I reckon most one-van plumbers would get more from catching the calls they already get than from paying for more of them. Leads cost money. The calls you miss were free, and someone else is picking them up.

I also think the real enemy is the gap between the ring and the callback. A callback at lunch feels quick to you. To someone with water under the sink, four hours is forever. Shrinking that gap is cheaper than almost anything else you can do for the business.

That's why we built Slotby. When you can't pick up, it answers, takes the details, checks the job's in your area and books it into your diary, then texts you. It's always upfront that it's an AI. Our Starter plan costs less a month than one of Tom's lost tap jobs. You can see the details on the pricing page, and how it works for plumbing on the plumbers page.

If you'd like to hear it first, ring the demo line on 07476 959334 and try booking a pretend job. Or tap Get in touch now to send us an enquiry and we'll get back to you. If you want the bigger picture on how these services work, there's a plain guide to the missed call service for tradespeople.

Jad, Founder of Slotby